Directories

The one everybody knows, and the one everybody over-indexes on. A good day sends real traffic and a permanent backlink; a bad day sends almost nothing.

Line up your first twenty upvotes before you post, launch just after midnight Pacific, and reply to every single comment. Do not ask for upvotes publicly — it gets launches removed.

Not a directory, but it behaves like the highest-variance one. A front-page Show HN is the single largest traffic event available to most indie products.

Title it plainly: Show HN: [what it does]. No adjectives, no exclamation marks. Post the technical detail in a first comment and stay in the thread all day.

A product directory bolted to a genuinely active founder forum. The listing itself is worth little; the forum is worth a lot.

Post your numbers, not your launch. Revenue and failure posts get read here — announcements do not.

For products that are not finished yet. Aimed at early adopters happy to try something rough, which makes it one of the few places a pre-launch page belongs.

There is a free queue and a paid skip. The free queue is slow — submit well before you need the traffic.

Ranks for [popular tool] alternative, which is high-intent search traffic that never stops. Slower to pay off than a launch and far more durable.

List yourself against the incumbent you genuinely replace. Claiming to be an alternative to something you are not gets flagged by users.

Software comparison directory with steady organic traffic and a clean listing page. Low effort, permanent listing.

Fill in every field including the alternatives — sparse listings rank badly inside the site's own search.

Worth it only if you sell to businesses and have customers willing to leave reviews. The listing is free; the value is entirely in the review count.

Ask for reviews individually and by name. A generic email blast to your whole list gets a handful; ten personal asks get eight.

The other B2B review directory. Same logic as G2 — a free listing that does nothing until it has reviews on it.

Both are owned by the same company, so a review push can often cover both at once.